An anonymous reader asks:

For some reason it fetched more than it should? As expected, it fetched “strolling around a system” and "numeric limits.

As unexpected, it also fetched “Making the most of a dumb fax switcher box in the old days” (Sep. 2025) and “Web page annoyances that I don’t inflict on you here” (from 2024?) - both of which I have definitely read before.

So… you have, and you haven’t. Sometimes I change things well after a post has gone live. I’m talking about months or years here. It doesn’t matter. If I see something that’s wrong, I go in and fix it, and it’ll ripple out as updates to old posts.

Here’s one such difference, as seen by the git repo which holds the input files:

— a/2025/09/01/fax/notes +++ b/2025/09/01/fax/notes ever wanted a second line. That is, in addition to the red/green, they also had a yellow/black pair in there, just hanging out, not doing anything. It didn’t “stop off” at any of the jacks, but it was in fact -present and ran interrupted from end to end. +present and ran uninterrupted from end to end.

See the problem? I originally said it “ran interrupted from end to end” which doesn’t make any sense, so I fixed it.

So, yeah, now and then, an old post will “spring back to life”, and that’s why. That’s usually just me fixing my mistakes, and sometimes adding in a new bit of flavor which wasn’t there the first time around.

There’s a field in the Atom feed spec which amounts to “date this entry was last updated”, and it gets bumped. The others stay the same, so your feed reader doesn’t bring it back up to the top (even though they’re physically present in the feed it downloads).

This is part of why the feed is the past 100 posts and not just the past couple of days or something like that. This way, if I fix something within a reasonable horizon, there’s a chance of the fix appearing on the reader side of things.

If your feed reader notices this, then everything is working as intended. If you’re seeing post updates on a reasonable timeframe, then odds are good that your feed reader software is doing the right thing.

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